As I watched the sun set from my balcony last night, a mysteriously booming bass speaker washed the beach in a lively party atmosphere. Local teens had organized an impromptu game of football; naked Malagasy children took turns flipping off each others shoulders into the public waters comprising Toliara’s harbor; and couples in love strolled hand in hand along the rocky shoreline. All simply enjoying the glowing day’s end by sharing this beautiful moment together.

This scene, fortunately, is quite the norm here - with one exception. This was the eve of a much lauded visit from the newly claimed President of Madagascar, Hery Rajaonariampianina. The thumping bass music was, in fact, a call to the impending circus of political feather displays....

The kids in the classroom are more important than the president on the stage...

Indeed as I write this the emergent President of Madagascar is leaving the city park just adjacent to my hotel complex, and oddly enough - I really really don't care.

I say oddly enough, because my teaching responsibilities for University of Toliara include training future High School teachers in the internationally acclaimed civics curriculum Project Citizen. How can I portend to be teaching civics and yet be so transparently disengaged from national-level politics here? Am I taking my job seriously or am I just playing around? On that last question - the answer is a most emphatic yes to both. I am dead serious about my job, yet I fully view my job as playing around. Let me explain.

The many schools of Toliara, such as Lycee Mixte Betania gather en masse to watch the political posturing of national-scale politics in Madagascar. In the months to come we delve deeper into urban civics education in this, the capital of the southwestern region of the island.

There may or may not have been corruption and intimidation and at any and every level of this recent Malagasy election process. I really don't know, but I really do believe- that it's, almost, entirely beside the point. Attempting to build a respectable national-level government in current-day Madagascar is the equivalent of an architect trying to build a skyscraper before it's foundation; or the natural world trying to grow an organism before developing it's organs - it' just not gonna happen that way! The great many spheres of governance comprising the organs of the Malagasy super-organism are in urgent need of an injection of both innovation and polycentric prosociality . For the PEAR Lab - this means going to the grassroots first. When it comes to the future of Malagasy politics - you'll have a very tough time convincing me that the real action is happening at the national level - it's clearly with the students!

A Solution in the Science of Play?
The best way to train teachers in Project Citizen is to have them experience it first hand. So this years training explores the connections between local educational policies and the rising science of play. Using resources from The National Institute for Play and The Evolution Institute, my Malagasy Undergrads and International Interns are beginning a small-scale action-research project in a handful of regional secondary schools to explore the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to the positive application of play science in these local institutions.

Malagasy students of today face an uphill path to authentic democratic governance. Designing school environments to promote cooperative and creative community solutions is likely to be a keystone strategy in any such developments.
The science of play may be able to help.

In international development "leapfrogging" is when a 'developing' country can look at how a 'developed' nation has screwed things up, and then use modern innovation to leap over the problems of history and emerge perhaps better off than had they simply followed in the footsteps of the so-called 'developed world'. It's my challenge to the students of Toliara to see if the science of play offers an opportunity to leapfrog the Malagasy educational system in just this way.

I suspect - just like in any other community around the world - Toliara will exhibit both strengths and weakness when it's educational policies around play around held up to the light of modern science.

Self-organized, youth directed play is an outstanding cultural asset here that some communities in the WEIRD world might well be jealous of. That is to say - kids in Toliara certainly don't need adults to tell them how to engage in play. It's such an endemic and rich aspect of local life in this city - I am really excited to have our educational psychology students see this phenomena through the lens of play science. Yet - play in Toliara may be under threat. Madagascar has adopted a largely standard French model of education, which, like that in much of Europe and the US, is notorious for it's potential to deprive kids of the ample and diverse play we now know to be a fundamental human right and developmental necessity. It will be up to these very students at the University of Toliara to design a an educational system that honors this right and capitalizes on this most affordable and exciting of applied sciences!

Dustin Eirdosh, M.Sc., is the curriculum designer for the Berlin-based NGO Big Red Earth, working to cultivate capacity in Madagascar’s southwestern University of Toliara, supporting leadership in applied studies of sustainable development.